Check out these beauties! The bottom three are Marmalade Hoverflies (Episyrphus balteatus) and the top two are simply called Hoverflies (Eupeodes corollae). Together they are busy fertilising a poppy in my garden. My garden does seem to be a resting place for a lot of fly species. Check these out.
There is nothing glamorous about this Blue Bottle (Calliphora vomitoria). With a Latin name like that you can guess how it eats. That's right, it vomits stomach acid on its food and then sucks it all back up through a straw like mouth. Nice.
On another leaf of my clematis was this Green Bottle (Lucilia caesar). Compared to the blue bottle this fly is seen less and hated less. The reason being that blue bottles are attracted to human cooking since they find food by scenting the air. The green bottle finds food in other ways and so will not enter your house.
Even more reviled is this the Flesh fly (Sarcophaga carnaria). This is the fly that specialises in laying its eggs on the dead and dieing. This is what maggots turn into.
One thing I find interesting about the web is this drive we are now seeing to get all human knowledge out there where it can be accessed by anybody. One project that I admire especially is the Wild About Britain project. This aims to photograph every species of plant and animal found in the UK. I, ladies and gentlemen am about to contribute photos unknown to science.
The Internet contains pictures of Rose Sawfly "slugs" and Rose Sawfly flies but there is no images of a Rose Sawfly undergoing the metamorphosis. i.e. a Rose Sawfly cocoon. Nobody knows what one looks like. Well folks, I have found three Rose Sawfly slugs on my Rose and have taken two into captivity for observation. As we speak they are happily munching rose leaves in a jar on my desk.
This was one of the Rose Sawfly (Arge ochropus) slugs on the 20th of July and the following picture was taken today (23rd July) and you can see that it is now almost twice as big.
When will it cocoon? Who knows, but we shall follow this very closely!
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